Talk:Xlib

The oldest source available is X.V10R3, which has almost entirely 1985 copyright dates. In particular, the Xlib portion has only 2 of 163 copyright notices with 1984 and 1985. The other files are copyrighted 1985. Saying "around 1985" is misleading, and replacing that with "circa" is not an improvement. TEDickey (talk) 21:27, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

A recent edit removed the advice to source against the O'Reilly book, and added a reference to a related paper written about ten years later, which doesn't add any insight (because neither of the authors were involved with Xlib in the 1980s). That says

 Perhaps the oldest software in modern X Window
 System [SG86] distributions is Xlib [SG92]: the
 oldest files in the current XFree86 distribution
 have a 1985 copyright.

and refers to

 Robert W. Scheifler and James Gettys. X Window System. Digital Press, third edition, 1992.

(although the comment in the XCB paper doesn't note the presence of "1984" in the copyrights, hinting that the authors may not have actually studied the early releases). Bitsavers has an earlier edition of the latter, which does provide the required information, making the XCB paper unnecessary. As one might realize from reading the quote, the paper is unsuitable for the purpose it was used. TEDickey (talk) 19:23, 28 May 2025 (UTC)

The following papers/memos from Project Athena might be worth investigating, however I don't believe there are scanned copies online:

Gettys, J., ''X Window System Installation," M.I.T. Project Athena (January 1, 1985)

Gettys, J., Newman, R., and Della Fera, T., ''Xlib - C Language X Interface," M.I.T. Project Athena (January 31, 1986).

Taken from: "PROJECT ATHENA TECHNICAL PLAN - Section F.1.1 Display Management: The X Window System" (October 1986) https://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/athenaplan/f.1.1.pdf

The following from January 1986 seems to be available online:

Gettys, J., "Problems Implementing Window Systems in UNIX," USENIX Association Winter Conference Proceedings, Denver, Colorado, USENIX Association, El Cerrito, California (January 15-17, 1986) pp. 89-97. https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/acrobat/860201-b.pdf

It doesn't explictely call out Xlib by name but mentions changes to the "Client library" over the previous 12-18months

Dóeltenga (talk) 10:42, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

yes, but - I think this paragraph from the X Window System book (1988) provides the needed information for the release date:

In September of 1985, version 9 of X was made publicly available, and
the field test of the VAXstation-II/GPX began. During that fall, Brown Uni-
versity and MIT started porting X to the IBM RT/PC, which was in field test
at those universities. A problem with reading unaligned data on the RT
forced an incompatible change to the protocol; this was the only difference
between version 9 and version 10.

because that was (according to that source) the first public release. I suppose one can identify the date for X10 (sometime between then and X10R3 in January 1986), but the file XlibInternal.h has a copyright for 1984 and 1985 (hinting that it had that name in 1984). TEDickey (talk) 12:16, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

From: rws@mit-bold (Robert W. Scheifler)
To: window@athena
Subject: window system X
Date: 19 June 1984 0907-EDT (Tuesday)

I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window
system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code
from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather
than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall
performance appears to be about twice that of W. The
code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are
still some deficiencies to be fixed up.

We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now
actively building applications on X. Anyone else using
W should seriously consider switching. This is not the
ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good
starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment
there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C
interface is in the works. The three existing
applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O
interface, and a primitive window manager. There is
no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to
volunteer? I may get around to it eventually.

Anyone interested in seeing a demo can drop by
NE43-531, although you may want to call 3-1945
first. Anyone who wants the code can come by with a
tape. Anyone interested in hacking deficiencies, feel
free to get in touch.

The following is supposedly the original announcement email for X from 1984 -- it's been doing the rounds on various forums since at least 1999 (Slashdot) and is used here on Wikipedia. Mention of a "C interface in the works" would probably be the origin of Xlib.

I see the following in Google's usenet archive from October 1985 which mentions presence of a C library:

https://groups.google.com/g/net.graphics/c/cY9Msh0OMvA/m/EzCi9vosS1oJ

It would also seem that PDF I linked to earlier is actually a talk given in October 1985 at USENIX conference in Denver:

https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.org.usenix/1985-October/000153.html

So yes while X9 was released in September 1985 I don't think we can discount that xlib might have existed in previous MIT/DEC only releases. Dóeltenga (talk) 13:40, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

The X Window System book says that it was used internally for a few months, and (not published) a few outside groups. But that's different from the intent of the Infobox template: it doesn't have a field to denote pre-release development. The book doesn't give a timeline of internal releases for X 1-8, for instance, because the authors did not consider that as important as the first public release. TEDickey (talk) 17:59, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

One might find something using the notes in this, though the link itself does not appear to be a WP:RS TEDickey (talk) 12:23, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

Regarding "Xlib - C Language X Interface", I don't see anything that's old enough to use (X.Org has a much-newer version of that, which can be ignored). But Alan Coopersmith has a Git repo (I've a copy) which gives a couple of dates:

• Wed Sep 4 13:31:50 1985 V9.0 release
• Sat Feb 1 15:55:22 1986 V10.0 release 3

However, there are only a handful of commits that old, and the others are not releases TEDickey (talk) 18:22, 29 May 2025 (UTC)

In the X.V10R3 sources, all of the copyrights in the X directory (corresponding to this topic) say

/* Copyright    Massachusetts Institute of Technology    1985   */ 

and the README file concludes with

                                        Robert W. Scheifler
                                        MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
                                        August 1985

The newest file in that directory is from February 1986. In the sources, 416 files have a 1985 copyright date, 161 with 1986. It seems that at least one release of X took place during 1985. According to comments and here, it required a licensing agreement with MIT (comment apparently by Jim Fulton, who was an early X developer). TEDickey (talk) 23:27, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Here is an alternate link for the failed verification in paragraph 2:

"Xlib and XCB compatibility was achieved by rebuilding libX11 as a layer on top of libxcb."

https://www.x.org/wiki/guide/xlib-and-xcb/#index2h2 173.245.132.79 (talk) 21:18, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

That's not suitable, since it gives the reader no clue regarding when this happened. I found a suitable source and trimmed the editorialization which detracted from the topic TEDickey (talk) 00:15, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

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The phrase "Definitive Guides", etc., does not appear on the title or copyright pages of these books. It is merely a promotional term which should not be part of the citation TEDickey (talk) 21:11, 6 October 2023 (UTC)